Emily Oster: We’ve also given parents the impression that there are a million opportunities to mess up. That you know, if you don’t get this exactly right, your child will be ruined forever. And it’s actually worse than that because if you don’t act right in every single moment, your child will be ruined forever, and that is a paralyzing fear.

Samantha Laine Perfas: Children have minds of their own, and since they’re very much still developing, those minds might lead to behaviors parents either want to mitigate or reinforce. Parents have difficult choices to make when it comes to guiding their kids, all with the goal of raising successful human beings.

How do you know if you’re getting it right?

Welcome to “Harvard Thinking,” a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today, I’m joined by:

Oster: Emily Oster. I am a professor and a writer. And I write about parenting and pregnancy and data.

Laine Perfas: She’s an economist and a Harvard alum and teaches economics at Brown University. She’s also the best-selling author of multiple parenting books. Then:

Kiran Bhai: I’m Kiran Bhai. I’m the executive director of Making Caring Common, which is a project based out of Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Laine Perfas: She studied at the Ed School and is a school counselor by training. And finally:

Meredith Elkins: Meredith Elkins. I’m a clinical psychologist specializing in the research and treatment of anxiety disorders in kids and parents. and I’m the author of a book, “Parenting Anxiety: Breaking the Cycle of Worry and Raising Resilient Kids.”

Laine Perfas: She’s on faculty at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry and is the co-director of the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program at McLean Hospital.

And I’m your host, Samantha Laine Perfas. I’m a writer for The Harvard Gazette. Today, we’ll talk about parenting and when to tell if your tactics are helping or hurting your kid’s development.

There are many different types of parenting styles out there. A few that I’ve seen in the headlines recently are helicopter, gentle, lighthouse, FAFO — which stands eloquently for “F Around And Find Out.” They all differ wildly in their approaches while claiming to be what’s best for raising good and healthy kids. What do we actually know from the data about what is best for kids and parents?

Elkins: There are all of these different parenting styles with all of these different creative names, but we have known for a long time what the ideal parenting style is. Diana Baumrind, back in the ’60s and ’70s, helped clarify that the ideal parenting style by far is an authoritative parenting style. And what that blends is warmth — all of that good stuff, the validation, the loving, nurturing, parent — but it also includes limits, right? It includes expectations. It includes setting standards that sometimes are going to mean that your kids are mad at you. That’s what we know by far has the best long-term outcomes for kids. She contrasted this with other parenting styles. So a permissive parenting style, which is all warmth and no limits — and that is more associated with, not completely, but some of the helicopter parenting, the gentle parenting. And then the authoritarian parenting style, which is all limits and no warmth — sometimes you hear that with the tiger mom parenting style. We have these modern names for things that have been established since the ’60s and ’70s. But what’s still true is still true, which is that the authoritative parenting style has the strongest predictive value for positive outcomes.

Oster: Part of what has happened in the more modern era is that fact [authoritative parenting style is best], everyone agrees on. Where people disagree is in how to achieve that. It’s one thing to say, “Be an authoritative parent,” but that’s actually not advice. That’s not a script. That’s not a set of checkboxes. Many of these parenting styles, parenting advice, the parenting industrial complex, is really about giving people more of a script, more of a set of checky guidelines to hit those things, and that’s where you get different approaches which are all going to tell you that they are an authoritative parenting style, but are going to be accomplishing that different ways, and are going to be potentially differentially successful there. And that’s why we’ve layered on top of something that everyone agrees on, something that no one agrees on.

Bhai: I agree with you both. When I’m working with families and creating resources, I’m trying to really boil it down to what ingredients are important in parenting, which we know are warmth and responsiveness, having clear and firm boundaries that you’re communicating, and sharing the why and creating healthy expectations, and also giving kids an appropriate amount of autonomy so they can grow and practice these skills and make mistakes. But they know you’re a sturdy parent who’s there to support them when they do make those mistakes.

Elkins: I don’t know if you all feel this way, but I sometimes find that parents have the assumption that, like, “If I had the right parenting style, then how I parent will feel good all the time.” Something that I tell the parents I work with is that good parenting feels bad sometimes. And to both of your points: What are the ingredients of how to parent authoritatively? Something that perhaps has been underexplored is the fact that parents are necessarily going to be feeling their own sense of distress, their own sense of anxiety, and questioning themselves when they try to do authoritative parenting well, when they try to set limits. And so many parents are like, “This feels so bad, so I must be doing it wrong.” That’s part of a broader challenge where culturally I think we’ve sort of assumed that negative emotions are somehow dangerous. They’re bad for our kids to experience. They’re bad for us to experience. That’s a real hurdle that I find in clinical work.

Oster: Part of this for me is that on top of everything that you said, we’ve also given parents the impression that there are a million opportunities to mess up. That you know, if you don’t get this exactly right, your child will be ruined forever. And it’s actually worse than that because if you don’t act right in every single moment, your child will be ruined forever, and that is a paralyzing fear.

Elkins: It’s parenting as brain surgery, right?

Oster: It’s like you tell your kid to put their shoes on and get out the door, and that’s it. You’ve created a lifetime of anxiety. It’s like, no. We could simultaneously tell people, “Yeah, we do know something about what works,” but also give them a little grace that within that there are quite a lot of ways to parent well and quite a lot of different ways to combine these ingredients, as you said, Kiran, to make a version of this that works for your family that you can implement. Because, of course, one of the most consistent things is that when you come to behavior modification, consistency is important, and that’s incredibly hard. In order to be consistent, you have to pick a system that you’re going to be able to follow through on every time, which is not going to be the same for every family.

Laine Perfas: The example you gave, Emily, of “I’m a terrible parent because I asked them to put their shoes on and get out the door.” I have a 4-year-old son and an almost 2-year-old daughter, and I will tell you, the shoes! Why is it so hard? You offer the Crocs, and they wanted the Nikes, and then suddenly, total meltdown, because the wrong shoes were offered. It makes me wonder in these moments where it’s like, “I don’t actually care what pair of shoes you wear, it doesn’t matter all that much,” how deferential should I be to the whims and desires of the child in the moment, especially when these meltdowns might be happening over things that are, from an adult perspective, relatively arbitrary?

Bhai: I’m personally a big advocate of not letting your child’s whims and desires dictate your actions as a parent. And I’m really living it right now, so I’m happy to hear all these shoe examples because that’s every morning for me. But …

Elkins: It’s super validating.

Bhai: My daughter takes her shoes off while we’re driving to school, and we’re in the drop-off line at daycare and she refuses to put them back on. And I’m like, “Give her options,” “Validate her emotions.” But I’m like, “In this moment, I need to be more authoritative, and she’s going to be OK.” I’m like, “Put on your shoes. You’ve got to get to your classroom.” I try to follow … even though this is ambitious, but a 90/10 rule where 80 to 90 percent of the time I’m going to follow these boundaries and the rules. Ten to 20 percent of the time, I’m an emotional being that has other stressors and other things contributing to my emotions, and I have to let it go and trust that my child is resilient and will be OK.

Oster: A big piece of that is figuring out what are the ways you’ll be able to be consistent and what are the things you’re willing to do? The example I always liked was, if you’re threatening to turn the car around if they keep fighting, you need to be ready to turn the car around. We don’t make empty threats. I do think this is where people struggle with some of the more permissive, gentle parenting approaches, which can work for many people, but the reality is, if you have decided the way you’re going to interact about the shoes is in every moment you’re going to wait until your child is comfortable with the shoe choice, you need to have a lot of space in the morning. And it could be that you decide, you know what? It’s OK. We don’t really have anywhere to be, this is going to work for my family. But if you are in a position where you do have somewhere to be, that approach is probably not something you’re going to be able to consistently apply, and that’s where I think then people get frustrated because they feel like, “I’ve been trying, I’m trying, I’m trying.” And then I’m on the other side, I’m screaming at you, which is also not where I want to be as a parent.

Elkins: I like to frame this nearly universal parenting question, which is, “What is my job in the moment when my child is in distress?” Is it to swoop in to protect them from distress, to provide safety and comfort, you know, effectively to follow their lead with the shoes? Or is it to encourage their independence, to help prepare them for a world that won’t always be comfortable? So much of the time, in the discussion around parenting styles and strategies, parents are really pinging between these two poles. “OK, they don’t want to put their shoes on, so I’m going to do the warm, validating thing. I’m going to go, again, heavy on that warmth piece” until they pick what feels right for them. But then reality just hits you in the face, and you have to get out the door. Then parents will very easily ping-pong to the other pole, and they’re just like, “Whatever!” And then they snap, and then they feel awful that they’ve done that. This can just be such a polarizing question.

Elkins: It’s so important to just pick your battles. When we’re working with kids in the anxiety and OCD world, we work with parents a lot on reducing accommodation. Accommodations are changes that we make to our behaviors to reduce the distress of others. If I know my kid will only eat the one kind of mac and cheese, then all the other kinds are out of my house for the rest of time because I am trying to reduce her distress, right? Parents accommodate all the time, and 95 to 98 percent of parents with anxious kids accommodate. This is a real treatment target. We talk about how we can slowly remove those accommodations over time. Sometimes parents get really amped. They’re so excited that a clinician has given them permission to not do the accommodation that they try to sort of rip the rug out from under their kids and reduce all accommodations. Then they come smack in the face with what you both are talking about, which is that they can’t sustain. It is really key to pick your battles. If you’re going to set a limit, make sure that you’re actually going to follow through with it, because otherwise you’re creating a bigger monster just through the principles of behaviorism.

Oster: One place this comes up for many parents is in dinner. People would like to make one meal. No one wants to be a short-order cook. But there are many parents who will come like, “OK, every night I’m making this kid this, and this kid this, and Dino Nuggets, and this.” They’re like, “Forget it. We’re all having the same thing. It’s just one meal. I’m making the one meal.” Then they make the one meal, and their kid refuses to eat it. It would be fine to hold the boundary and be like, “You know what? You got plenty of food. You’re, like, generally a well-nourished person. You actually don’t need to eat dinner tonight, and you’ll eat a little more breakfast, and it will be fine.” That’s a totally fine boundary to hold, but it is a very hard boundary to hold for many people. Your kid’s sitting there. They obviously would like to eat. You feel like you’re starving them. Is this “Oliver Twist?” Whatever. So there, I think the question parents want to ask themselves is, “What could I do to hold this boundary but still make this OK?” Is it there’s a default backup meal? In my house it was hummus and veggies. You can always have hummus and veggies. You can always have a cheese sandwich. There’s something I’m always going to let you have, which isn’t requiring me to cook something. Or I say, “I’m going to try for the meal to have different parts, and you don’t have to eat all of the parts,” or whatever it is that’s going to make you be able to follow through on that.

Bhai: Emily, I love that idea of being prepared in any of these situations. It’s hard because you’re in the heat of the moment, your emotions are rising, and you’re like, “I’m going to turn the car around if you don’t stop screaming.” But you might not be prepared because you have to get to school or wherever you’re headed to. And same thing with dinner. I love that preparation. On the emotional side, when I work with families, I try to have the same messaging, which is if you can be a little bit more in tune with your own emotions and your own capacity to be patient, if you’re able to do that assessment before you’re in a high-intense moment with your children, you can go in communicating that “This is a really hard week for Mom this week because Grandma’s sick and I’m stressed,” or “Work is really stressful and I have a lot of deadlines, so this week the rules are going to be a little different.” That could help make the rules a little bit more flexible with communication.

Laine Perfas: This has been mentioned in various responses so far, but I wanted to talk about the rise in pressure that parents are facing today compared to past generations. I was looking at one estimate that showed parents now spend twice as much time parenting than parents did 50 years ago. Another one was that working moms today spend more time parenting than stay-at-home moms in the past, and that just blew my mind. Is it a wonderful thing worthy of celebration that we’re spending so much more time invested in parenting, or is it driven by anxiety and resulting in parental burnout?

Bhai: One of my least favorite parenting approaches right now is how increasingly individualized highly intensive parenting has become, and we’re saturated with best practices for making a magical childhood that you’re responsible for. It’s very perfection-oriented, and that’s the best way for us to feel like we’re failing as parents is to be perfect. Because there’s not a single day that goes perfect as a parent. That’s a huge issue, and instead we try to help parents shift that and talk about “How can we help your child navigate difficulty and care about people and contribute to something beyond themselves?” because that’s what truly creates a happy and meaningful life in the long term. But also there seems to be a lack of community in parenting, and a lot of parents are sharing that they feel lonely. Parents of children who are younger feel high rates of anxiety and depression. As a society, we’re not paying attention to that, or there’s a lot of articles written about it, but no policy regarding it. There are a lot of missed opportunities in schools and public spaces to help parents connect. It’s that crumbling of our infrastructure, where we don’t have villages, and it becomes just highly individualized, and that puts a lot of pressure on parents.

Oster: That is a piece of it; there’s a demographic shift in when people are having kids. Age has gone up a lot over time, and there are many more demographic groups where people are having kids in their late 30s. And then there’s a particular set of parenting anxiety that comes when you have gotten to the college you wanted, finished the college you wanted, gotten the job you wanted, gotten the promotion, like win, win, win, everything is an opportunity to accomplish. It’s like, OK, now I got my kids. I’m like, “I’m going to win this shit too.” And it’s hard to win your kids, much more complicated than winning your job, and much less responsive to effort in the same way, and I think that we’re coming in expecting — and I see this so much with parents of babies that are like, “OK, collecting data in my job has been very effective. So now I’ve got this spreadsheet. It’s got how many minutes they ate, how many minutes did I have the window open a quarter inch, an eighth an inch, I’m going to put it on a map, and I’m going to see when they sleep.” The answer is your baby just sleeps at random. It doesn’t know about these things. We are generating anxiety around an expectation that this is something we can control. And then you get into older kids, and there’s more of this feeling of “I can control their future by getting them into the right school or the right travel soccer league or the right whatever,” so now there’s no just screw-around-outside soccer, and now we’re not in the community. These things are kind of all talking to each other in some positive ways but also some negative ways.

Elkins: It’s so interesting the way the data can be so empowering and helpful, and then also can become anxiety-provoking and limiting. I was working with someone in my private practice recently, a mom who was talking about her Oura Ring, and she was saying, “My Oura Ring was saying that I was stressed out and overly anxious,” and she’s like, “And I actually thought that I was OK.” And she was like, “But I guess I wasn’t.” And it is just so interesting. We are the most psychologically informed generation of parents who has ever lived, right? We have more parenting resources and mental health awareness and expert guidance than any parents in history. This generation of parents is trying so hard, and yet we’re continuing to see parental burnout continuing to be such an issue. Child mental health is not great either, to put it lightly. And so how can we find this middle path between “Yes, we want more knowledge, we want more data that helps us make better decisions,” and also “How do we not become completely captive to and crippled by the anxiety that comes with that?”

Laine Perfas: Kiran, you mentioned just how the village has disappeared over the years. Where does one find a village, and what is the value of community in raising a child?

Bhai: I believe being part of a community can be transformational for a family, all parties involved. In my work, that’s focused a lot on developing empathy and seeing empathy as a muscle that you have to learn to use and practice and build the habits for. When you’re part of a community, you are surrounded by more people. You can be practicing perspective-taking, understanding other people’s emotions, contributing to others, and finding purpose in being part of something bigger than yourself.

When it comes to finding a village, like many things in parenting, the emphasis is always on parents doing something, and I feel like that’s not fair always. There’s a lot that schools and our community spaces and policies can do to support parents in combating loneliness and building a community and creating spaces where you can connect with others. In the shorter term, if you’re trying to find a village, I always recommend trying to make small connections in the spaces you’re already in, whether that’s a park or a library. It can be hard to approach a parent if you’re shy or more introverted. But really try to nudge yourself when you’re in those spaces to try to connect with somebody else. I read this article about friendship sparks. I think we talk a lot about sparks when it comes to romance, but not as much with friendship. If you’re feeling that spark with somebody you’re talking to, be bold. Ask them to go get coffee. And then there’s a lot of work now about micro-connections, so saying hi to people, noticing people you see regularly, can really build your trust in where you live.

Oster: I also think there’s a kind of evolution of this and asking the question, “What is it that I need in a village now?” My kids are big. They’re like 15 and 11. At some point, we started a text chat with the moms of my younger kid’s class. The thing that it delivers is the connection on the kids. There was a snow day. School was closed for a week; we had 3 feet of snow. People took turns; everybody was like, “OK, who has the kids today? We’re just going to shop them around to the houses so somebody is supervising and we can get our jobs done.” That’s an example of a kind of village that’s delivering something that’s different from what I needed when I was home with a baby, which was more of a connection for the adults. There are a lot of different ways to ask, “What kind of a village do I need to build for this moment now,” and I think there’s so many forms of a village, but you do have to be proactive to find that.

Elkins: Sometimes when parents are asked that question about a village or who is your support system, especially for parents who are already coming in stretched paper-thin, it’s: “Oh my god, this is something else I have to do? Now I have to go find a village? How am I supposed to do that?” So particularly when they’re coping with something acutely stressful, I talk less about the village and I talk about, “OK, call in your ride-or-dies. Who is the Amy Poehler to your Tina Fey? Who can you call in and just say, ‘We are working on something really hard. I need your funniest memes, I need your best pep talks, I need your voice notes.’” And just, to your point, Emily, about being really specific about what you’re looking for in this moment. It requires a lot of bravery because you’re being vulnerable and really asking for what you need, but I think  identifying those one or two people, hopefully within the broad village, but maybe it’s a really tiny village — but they’re able to show up for you for what you need.

Oster: People really like to be needed. When you’re parenting, we don’t ask as much of our kids as an earlier generation did in terms of responsibility and so on at home. But actually, we could ask more of them, and kids like to be needed. It is valuable for you to say, “Hey, I need you to do this because this is contributing to the family.” Often your kid will respond better to that than you think.

Laine Perfas: You know, the whole point of this conversation is parents wanting their kids to do good to others and do good on their own. What is the best way to support your child in developing those behaviors that benefit themselves and the people around them?

Oster: Let me say two things here. One is there’s a piece of modeling, so your kids watching what you’re doing, and a lot of what they’re picking up is how you are behaving toward other people and how you are operating your life, and that’s worth remembering. I think the other piece, especially as kids get older, is remembering that your job in developing resilience is not to fix your kids’ problems, but to be the support. There are so many more understanding conversations with our kids than problem-solving conversations, especially with an older kid, with a teenager. I have found myself much more frequently actually asking, “Is this a problem-solving conversation or an understanding conversation?” and usually it’s the second one, and then it’s just your job is to sit there and be like, “Yeah, I’m here, and I love you, and I think you’re great.”

Elkins: I agree with that 100 percent. I think to your earlier point, Kiran, there’s a lot of focus on self and wellness and feeling good in the ether right now. And I think that sets us up for failure because there’s this expectation that if I’m not feeling good all the time that there must be something wrong. By extension, if my kid isn’t happy all the time, this is a parenting failure. If we can help reframe that a fulfilling, meaningful life offers the full range of human emotions, both the unpleasant ones and the pleasant ones, then we can help condition kids to get more comfortable being uncomfortable. We need to make sure that kids have the sort of architecture of resilience in there so that they don’t crumble and become overly distressed when they see someone else’s pain. That they can see themselves mirrored in that in some way and then still step up and be helpful. And we can’t do that if happiness and positive affect are our North Star all the time.

Laine Perfas: Do you see a connection between developing empathy and developing resilience? And how are those related?

Bhai: The tie is, to be resilient, you do need people around you. Resiliency doesn’t need to be on yourself, and a kid doesn’t need to hold it all and be like, “I can go through these hard things and persevere.” You can be more resilient when you know you’re not in it alone, and you have a community around you, and you feel supported and seen for who you are. And I think when you have empathy, you can be that person for somebody else, right? It feels good to help. It feels good to be part of this network.

Oster: The other connection I would make is that these are both things that you can model for your kids. There are a lot of ways we can model empathy. There are opportunities, especially with older kids, to model resilience a bit more. We’re often reluctant to tell them about the things that are difficult in our own lives or the things that we’re struggling with, but sometimes surfacing those and being clear — like, “This thing is happening, it’s bothering me, but it’s so great that I can be together with you here, and here’s how I’m working through that” — we could be more open with our kids about the things we struggle with and how we are working through them, because that’s an opportunity for them to learn about it.

Elkins: I’m so glad that you’ve brought that up, and that’s something that I actively do in my work with families, either with the parents struggling with anxiety or the child struggling with anxiety. Because we understand as parents that if we can be calm and regulated, we’re going to be better guides for our kids, parents are putting tremendous pressure on themselves to be these calm, cool automatons who never have any negative emotions, never feel scared, never feel sad, never feel frustrated, and we really can rake ourselves over the coals when we do, and we show it to our kids. I stress with families, like, “Gosh, if your kid never sees that you have the full spectrum of human emotion, they’re going to feel like there’s something wrong with them when they feel it, right?” We talk about actively modeling coping with hard things, being resilient. Sharing that struggle in a developmentally appropriate way with your kid, not only models resilience, but pulls for that empathy. It achieves so many different things. It makes them feel less alone in their experience of distress, it helps them to see you as a fully fleshed-out person, and it gives them a model for how to deal with some of those painful emotions.

Laine Perfas: When you inevitably, as a parent, are less than perfect or you handle a situation that you’re not happy with and your kid takes the brunt of it, what is the value of repair? And could you talk about what that looks like in a healthy way?

Oster: I will say, I don’t think we know as much about this as one would think you do from the internet. But there’s an awful lot of emphasis on the idea that the most important thing is to apologize, and there’s some reasonable logic to that. But we sometimes oversell this as some kind of complex evidence-based strategy, because I don’t think there’s much. Certainly there are no randomized trials on this. But I don’t know. Meredith, this is your space.

Elkins: I would agree. I’ve seen no studies on the benefits of repair. It’s one of those things that, it seems good in principle. My concern about the application of this, again, falls under that intensive parenting guideline. What is intensive parenting? We’ve been talking about it, but one of the key hallmarks of it is that good parenting is child-led. We are following the lead of the child and, frankly, then the child’s emotions and preferences are dictating what the adults are doing. My concern with maybe the dark side of the repair is the over-repair, of being like, “Oh my gosh, Mommy did the worst thing and I’m so sorry,” and it’s “Your emotions are more important than my emotions. Your experience is more important than your grandmother’s experience.” And I think that puts the primacy on the child and really cuts away from the need to be a part of a community. It’s good in principle but I like to temper it without being overly deferential to the child as the ultimate authority of what everyone in their space should be doing.

Oster: I do think there’s a distinction between repair and apology. And the sort of way it’s sometimes talked about is, “I yelled at my kid, now I have to apologize” and own up to when you make a mistake, which is actually a much more important thing for modeling. If you said that you were going to do something, like, “I said I was going to sign you up for this thing and then I flaked out and didn’t do it, that’s on me.” And it’s not that I have to grovel at your feet, but I think to be like, “Yeah, you asked me to do this, and I’m really sorry, I forgot, and that totally wasn’t the right thing to do, and it is my fault.” That is the modeling we do want to send to our kids. It’s totally different than the way people … It’s accountability, and I think that’s a really strong message, different from the kind of: “My emotions got away from me and I now have to prostrate myself on the altar of…”

Elkins: Childhood approval.

Oster: Exactly.

Bhai: I agree with you both. It can make the parent feel better sometimes when you’re like, “I really messed up that.” And it’s again, it’s like allowing your child to see you go through the whole spectrum of emotions and feeling OK about it. Like, when I do lessons as a school counselor, the first lesson is all emotions are OK. There are no good or bad emotions. Some just don’t feel as good in your body. If it makes you feel better to some degree, it’s OK to say, “I was really upset. I didn’t want to yell, but that’s how upset I was, and I’m sorry about that. Let’s move on.” As I said, I’m not a big fan of totally accommodating to your child’s every need and emotion because I think that feeds into a bad cycle often. There’s some balance with it.

Laine Perfas: If you are a parent and you are doing your best, is there anything that will indicate if it’s actually working or not?

Elkins: The uncertainty that’s at the core of parenting is we don’t know, and even if we think that something is going wonderfully at age 12, are there effects of that at age 32 that we just can’t predict? I like to reorient parents back to the findings that we consistently see, that one of the best predictors of long-term child outcomes is the stable, nurturing presence of a single adult in their life. Parents, just by being there and just by loving your kids, that is already doing so much. And that is totally an unsatisfactory response because parents are like, “No, I want to know if I’m doing it right.” And you can’t. You’ve got to sit with that uncertainty but know that you are enough in and of yourself.

Oster: I love that. I tell people a very similar thing, which is, yes, you have to sit with this uncertainty, but if we look at the data and we ask what determines like 80, 90, a huge share of child outcomes, it’s “Does your kid have a safe place to live, enough to eat, a stable adult in their life?” That’s almost the whole thing. All the stuff most people are worrying about — yeah, there’s uncertainty about it, but it’s pretty on the margin relative to these really big things.

Bhai: I wish there was a magical checklist. I like what you’re both saying: Safety, security, and love are the key ingredients to a happy, healthy, successful life and childhood. And then it’s very nuanced from there, what every child needs, what your family dynamic is, what you’re going through. With that attunement, you can nuance it a little bit more, but there really is no magical answer or checklist. You just do your best in your circumstances and provide unconditional love to your child and try to support them in a way that they’re still growing skills while they know you’re there for them.

Oster: Can I say one other thing, which is I think so many of these conversations about parenting are: “OK, this is hard, how do we do it right? It’s so challenging.” That’s all very true. We maybe don’t say enough that being a parent is awesome. I love my kids so much. I can’t believe I could ever feel that way about a person. And it’s also really fun. Not every minute, some of them are uncomfortable, but there are a lot of really, really fun parts of being a parent, both fun in the moment and fun in the kind of existential sense, and rewarding, and it’s just an amazing human experience. I worry sometimes we lose that amazing piece of it while we’re like, “Wow, this is really hard. We need to get to school, with our shoes on.” But much of it is great.

Laine Perfas: If you could shift one thing about the way we approach parenting right now, what would you change?

Elkins: We’ve hit on this a little bit, but I think it’s just such an important thread. I think that this belief that good parenting means eliminating discomfort in your children has had so many negative sequelae. It puts tremendous pressure on parents. It models, again, for kids, as you were saying, Kiran, that not all emotions are OK, that there are some that are bad, and we need to fix them right away. Otherwise, why would Mom or Dad be in here helping me with this? When we’re giving all negative emotions kind of celebrity status, it sets parents up to do what loving parents do, which is to make it more likely that we jump in, we accommodate, we rescue, and we’re just seeing the corrosive effect on resilience over time with that. I believe really firmly that we need to reorient parents away from this culture that is utterly deferential to distress and toward something that’s really more empowering: that we can all, both parents and kids, tolerate negative affect, and that even though good parenting feels bad sometimes, that there’s actually a lot of strength in that.

Oster: I would like to see people prioritize the adult partnering relationship in cases in which there are more parents in the household. We have moved, in many cases, to a place where when people have kids, they just decide, we’re just going to do this together, just the kid part for many years, and we’re not going to think about how we can make our relationship work inside this. I hear quite a lot from parents who are sad that they miss their partner who is currently in their house. And people could do more to prioritize that. We’ve set up this idea that every waking moment that you have that you’re not at work, you have to be with your kid. And if you are not with them, that’s bad. And, actually, your relationship with your partner is also pretty important.

Bhai: I love both of those. The Making Caring Common stance and the work I do is shifting away from this mindset of this intensive parenting that’s very individualistic. The shift that we’re calling for is, happiness comes from many different things. We need to build a stronger foundation, and caring relationships and purpose really feed into strong mental health and happiness in the long term. So shifting to: How can I be a good friend? How can I be part of a community? How can I cultivate caring relationships? Because it’s those relationships that will get you through the really hard tumbles in life and help you maintain resiliency.

Laine Perfas: Thank you all for this really great conversation.

Oster: Thank you.

Elkins: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. For a transcript of this episode and to see our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. And if you like this podcast, rate and review us on Apple and Spotify, or like us on YouTube. It helps other listeners find us. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Paul Makishima, and Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound design by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University. Copyright 2026.